It was probably unintentional, but Muse singer/guitarist/keyboardist Matt Bellamy summed up his band’s strengths and weaknesses when he wrote the lyrics Your brain needs some assistance / But I’ll still take all the blame for the song “Escape” on Muse’s 1999 debut album, “Showbiz.”

That’s because Muse has achieved worldwide fame with music that can be heady one moment, overwrought and pretentious the next, and sometimes simultaneously thoughtful and pompous in the same breath.

Undeniably, it’s been a winning formula for this musically accomplished English trio, which has achieved broad mainstream success -- witness its frankly maddening current hit, "Madness" -- while retaining enough indie credibility to have headlined the 2010 edition of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio.

Or, as Bellamy sings on “Survival,” an uber-bombastic song on Muse’s sixth and newest album, “The 2nd Law”: Life’s a race and I’m going to win / Yes, I’m going to win / I’ll light the fuse and I’ll never lose... (Not coincidentally, the quasi-operatic “Survival” was written for the London Olympics, where it was used as the official theme song.)

That’s not to say that Bellamy, who has a child with American actress Kate Hudson, doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Last year, he predicted that “The 2nd Law” would be a “Christian gangsta-rap jazz odyssey, with some ambient rebellious dubstep and face-melting metal flamenco cowboy psychedelia” (although at least half of that turned out to be reasonably accurate).

Indeed, there are parts of “The 2nd Law” that suggest what might happen if U2, Skrillex, Radiohead and Rush were suddenly able to collaborate with Queen, in its FreddieMercury-led prime. But that’s no surprise, except for the addition of Skrillex-styled dubstep to the mix, since some of Muse’s past songs owe such major debts to U2 (“Resistance,” “Starlight,” “Map of the Problematique”), Radiohead (“New Born” and so many more that, well, you get the idea.

To their credit, Bellamy, bassist/keyboardist/singer Christopher Wolstenholme and drummer/percussionist Dominic Howard have made their prog-rock chops and ambition palatable to arenas (in the U.S.) and stadiums (in Europe) full of enthusiastic fans, who sing along to nearly every word.

Yet, for all the skill involved, Muse’s penchant for bombast and histrionical displays tends to overwhelm the band’s music and its ability to make a deeper emotional impact.

The band's eye-popping stage shows are state of the art affairs -- Lasers! Hydraulic lifts! 3-D pyramids -- as Muse demonstrated when it performed a sold-out show here a few years ago at SDSU's Cox Arena. By all accounts, the trio's current tour, which stops Monday at Valley View Casino Center (formerly the San Diego Sports Arena), is an even more lavish and over-the-top affair.

But featuring such high-tech stage productions can be a blessing and a curse, depending on whether the visual sizzle enhances, or detracts from, the music at hand. And my most vivid memory of Muse's Cox Arena performance is that the split-second timing required to pull off such an ambitious show -- "Look, Muse's three members are rocking out while barely moving, since all three are perched 20 or more feet above the stage and could topple off at any moment!" -- is a visual one, not a musical one.